Friday Jul 25, 2014

Our spotlight this week is a very cool use case for Oracle VM VirtualBox. You’re probably familiar with Oracle VM VirtualBox, it lets you run multiple, different operating systems on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Solaris. It’s really a fantastic tool for running, say, Windows on your Mac, or an Oracle Linux test environment on your Windows machine. But this is a unique use case for it, it’s used to host the PeopleSoft Update Manager.

Our friends over at the PeopleSoft Apps Strategy blog have a blog post about PeopleSoft Update Manager, and links to several documentation videos. If you use PeopleSoft, this will be some great information for you. And if not, it might give you some ideas on how to leverage virtual appliances running in Oracle VM VirtualBox for your own projects!

And for our spotlight this week, I wanted to highlight a fantastic series of events coming up during August in Latin America:

Congratulations to the Latin America User Groups on assembling yet another great tour for 2014!!! Agendas are packed full of great topics from Oracle Database to Oracle Linux, Oracle VM, including Java and Cloud Solutions. If you find yourself in the region or live there, please register and reserve a seat. Talk to the experts, get hands on. No spin, just a great learning experience with experienced users!!

Thursday Jul 17, 2014

In May we announced the tech
preview of the Oracle’s Distribution for OpenStack for Oracle Linux and Oracle
VM. As we have been doing for many years with Linux and Xen, we plan to work
with the OpenStack community and help make OpenStack an enterprise grade
alternative for cloud deployments.

We are very pleased with the Mirantis
announcement today stating that Mirantis will offer Oracle Linux and Oracle
VM as part of their supported operating systems and hypervisors options. Right from the beginning we stated that our approach to OpenStack will be open and collaborative (see Wim Coekaerts’ blog). We said we’ll work with the rest of industry and support our customers with any choices they make with regards to OpenStack distribution and today, with this announcement from Mirantis, we take another step in this direction.

With this announcement our joint customers can
choose Oracle Linux as their operating system and Oracle VM Server as their
hypervisor of choice and build an OpenStack deployment with end to end support.
Customers can now use the most advanced capabilities in Oracle Linux like
Ksplice and Dtrace and achieve better scale and performance with Oracle VM Server as well as receive 24/7 support directly from
Oracle. Using an enterprise grade hypervisor and Linux distribution such as
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM brings OpenStack deployment to a new level of
reliability. a higher level of reliability allows users to transition more workloads onto
OpenStack confidently, knowing that each part of the stack is well supported.

On top of that Oracle Linux is fully supported as a
guest operating system on the Mirantis distribution of OpenStack. Oracle Linux
is free to use and redistribute including patches and updates with the option to purchase support subscription from Oracle. We believe that
choosing Oracle Linux as guest operating system is the best and most cost efficient
option and we would like every customer to have the option to use it.

Oracle will
continue to collaborate with other OpenStack solution providers to allow them
to offer Oracle Linux and Oracle VM as part of their solution. Our goal remains
the same: jointly deliver great solutions and support experience for our mutual
customers. We also look forward to working with other vendors to certify
networking, storage, hypervisor and other plugins into the Oracle OpenStack
Distribution.

We believe in keeping OpenStack open and collaborative
and we will continue to focusing on:

Working with other cloud solution
to make sure they can integrate with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM

Working with hardware and software
vendors to integrate their solution with Oracle Distribution of OpenStack for
Oracle Linux and Oracle VM

Assuring that Oracle Linux is
supported as guest operating system on any virtualization platform

We look forward to continue working with our partners and customers helping to make OpenStack a first class solution for the enterprise.

Friday Jul 11, 2014

The Oracle VM Storage Connect framework provides a storage
discovery and provisioning API that enables the provisioning and
management of storage platforms directly from within Oracle VM Manager. The
abstraction provided by the Storage Connect framework allows
administrators to perform provisioning operations without the need
to know the specific behavior of any storage platforms that are
being used within the Oracle VM infrastructure. The Storage
Connect API allows third party storage vendors to develop their
own Oracle VM Storage Connect plug-ins that enable their storage appliances to interface
with the Storage Connect framework.

With the release of Oracle VM 3.3, the storage connect
plug-in for Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance has been updated to enable Oracle VM 3.3 to provision and manage the
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance. To download the software and read the
documentation, visit

Thursday Jul 10, 2014

“Linux and Virtualization Showcase (aka.Pavilion) ” is the venue for you !

Join our partners :

Fortinet

A10 Networks

Amitego AG

eGinnovations

Lenovo

SEP Software, Corp.

Mirantis

Fujitsu

Tegile

NuageNetworks, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture

Secure-24

Intel

and good news is we have room for more… come and be part of this exciting showcase.

Attended by tens of thousands of Oracle customers and partners, Oracle OpenWorld is a venue for an intense five days of knowledge sharing and learning, as well as networking with your peers and decision-makers.

In particular, the Oracle Linux and Virtualization Showcase offers a streamlined, focused and turnkey opportunity for Partners to reach the largest targeted audience in the least amount of time. Just bring your laptop with your solutions supporting Oracle Linux, Oracle VM and Oracle OpenStack – demonstrate the seamless integration of your solution to a targeted Oracle OpenWorld audience, whose interest lies in enterprise-scale infrastructure, and truly “Open” Openstack solutions.

Located in Moscone South, Booth 611, the turnkey showcase package includes advertising, networking demo station, signage, conference passes, and pavilion-specific branding, along with an option for a speaking session.Make sure you take advantage of this opportunity to stand out from the crowd showcasing your Oracle Linux, Oracle VM or solution in the Moscone South Exhibition Hall.

We also have a new screencast about Oracle VM Templates for you. It's both for Oracle partners and anyone who needs to distribute applications:

Grow Your Business Using Oracle VM Templates

Looking to boost your revenue and sustain growth for your business? View this screencast to see how you can gain an unfair advantage over your competition using Oracle VM Templates for distribution of Oracle Linux, Oracle applications or your own applications.

Wednesday Jul 02, 2014

We are pleased to announce Oracle
VM 3.3, Oracle’s
latest server virtualization product. It deliver enhanced ease of use for x86 and
SPARC architectures, improved management features, and expanded support for
both Oracle and non-Oracle workloads, including support for OpenStack—providing
customers and partners with additional choices and interoperability. This
release continues to enable rapid enterprise application deployment and
simplify lifecycle management.

Many customers are using Oracle VM 3 today, Oracle VM help customers virtualize the entire Oracle software stack; in addition, as a general purpose server virtualization solution, Oracle VM runs many non-Oracle workloads as well.

With the latest Oracle VM 3.3 release, the product is getting even better and brings greater customer benefits. New Oracle VM 3.3 highlights:

Fully supported Web Services API: Oracle VM Manager now
exposes a fully supported Oracle VM Web Services API that offers both SOAP and
REST interfaces to program any action supported within Oracle VM, enabling more
automation and interoperability. See the
Oracle VM Web Services API Developer's Guide
for more information.
In addition, the Oracle VM Manager Web
Interface and the Oracle VM Manager Command Line Interface have been rewritten
to use the new WS-API to provide further consolidation and consistency.

New statistics and events model: The statistics and events
model has been entirely rewritten to offer significant performance gains. A
queued job task is in place to monitor the number of generated statistics and
to adjust the threshold automatically during periods where the number of
statistics exceeds the threshold.

Huge Page support: Support for Huge Pages (or Super Pages)
has been added to allow guests, hosted on an x86-based server pool, to take
advantage of this functionality to improve performance and reduce the I/O that
results from page lookups in virtualized environments.

Improvements to guest VM messaging: A change to the Oracle
VM Guest Additions messaging facility to support multiple key-value pairs in a
single message reduces the number of jobs generated within Oracle VM Manager,
resulting in significant performance gains.

Tighter
security control: Reduces the
number of required open ports to minimize potential access points and security
vulnerabilities. To protect and ensure authorized access to Oracle VM Server, a
certificate-based authentication model has been implemented for Oracle VM Agent
and Oracle VM Manager.

Virtual machine configuration file view: It is now
possible to view the virtual machine configuration file for any virtual machine
directly within the Oracle VM Manager Web Interface and Oracle VM Manager Command
Line Interface, to provide more transparency for the configuration that is
actually applied to a virtual machine when it is started by the hypervisor.

New virtual machine console: The virtual machine console
has been redesigned to use JavaScript and HTML5 features. There is no longer
any requirement to install or run software locally on the client computer. This
change reduces complexity and provides a more reliable console tool.

Inbound migration Lock: A new feature allows you to
protect an Oracle VM Server from attempts to move or migrate other virtual
machines to that server. This allows you to run selected virtual machines on a
specified Oracle VM Server, and to be certain that no other virtual machines
are started on the server, consuming resources that may be mission critical for
some applications.

Improved VLAN support:Simplified VLAN support definition enables
users to specify VLAN interfaces as needed and to define which ports are used
for which VLAN tags, bringing more flexibility to network design.

Improved
SPARC virtualization management and availability: Additional storage
types such as Fibre Channel,
iSCSI,
ZFS volume, and local disk, in addition to
NFS,can now be directly
assigned to virtual machines
running in a SPARC server pool managed by Oracle VM Manager, offering customers
more choices when choosing storage with Oracle VM Server for SPARC. Furthermore, virtual machine high availability and support for
configuration of redundant I/O service domains improve system availability for
business-critical operations.

Oracle VM Server installation partitioning: The Oracle VM
Server Installer now handles all disk partitioning itself, to optimize
installation. Part of this process make sure that only the maximum required
disk space for the Oracle VM Server software is used. Any remaining disk space
is automatically partitioned to be used as a discoverable local disk that can
be used to host a storage repository, or attached to a virtual machine hosted
on the server. This improvement to disk space usage ensures the best possible
use of machine resources. This change is only supported for locally hosted boot
disks and does not apply to SAN disks.

New guides and improved interface coverage: The documentation
has been restructured to provide more comprehensive coverage.

Infrastructure changes in Oracle VM Manager: Much of the
technology used to enable Oracle VM Manager has been updated to take advantage
of new features, improved performance and security fixes. Major changes to
these components include: Oracle WebLogic Server and ADF upgraded to 12c; Java
upgraded to version 7; MySQL Database Enterprise Edition upgraded to version
5.6.